The loss or failure of an organ or tissue is one of the most frequent, devastating, and costly problems in human health care. A new field, tissue engineering, applies the principles of biology and engineering to the development of functional substitutes for damaged tissue.
Tissue engineering is an interdisciplinary field that applies the principles of engineering and the life sciences toward the fundamental understanding of structure-function relationships in normal and pathological mammalian tissue and the development of biological substitutes that restore, maintain, or improve tissue function. It involves the use of living cells, together with extracellular matrices, either natural or synthetic, in the development of implantable parts or devices for the restoration or replacement of function.
One of the three general strategies that have been adopted for the creation of new tissue substitutes is the utilization of cells placed on or within matrices. The matrices are fashioned from natural materials, or from synthetic biodegradable polymer fiber scaffolds, and are then used as the ECM.
Despite the evolution of numerous artificial or synthetic grafts that have been developed, these tissue replacements are still unable to adequately substitute for nature's highly complex structures. Today's challenge in tissue transplantation is to overcome the body's defense system and to strive to improve the functioning of the graft. Despite major advancements in this field, modern tissue transplantation remains associated with complications including inflammation, degradation, scarring, contracture, calcification (hardening), occlusion and rejection. There have been extensive medical biomaterial research efforts directed toward the engineering of improved transplantable tissue grafts, however an ideal artificial graft has not yet been developed.
Detergents have been used in the prior art to remove cellular components from tissue, as described in Brendel. et. al., U.S. Pat. No. 4,801,299. However, as described therein, the detergents cannot be successfully used with tissues which have previously been altered with a fixative, such as a crosslinking agent.